Monday, March 16, 2009

During the winter, I stumbled upon an amazing combination of flavors for a lasagna: veal and dashi. I wrote about it here. This time around it was different, but took advantage of another exotic broth to create a standard-looking dish that had a surprising depth and complexity of flavor. In this instance, I used the last quart of barbecued pork broth from the freezer plus a healthy dollop of our basil/sorrel/nasturtium pesto to make the velouté, and ground turkey with a jar of our free-range tomato sauce for the... uh... sauce.

The combination of our super-sweet tomatoes and the pork/pesto liason made the turkey almost taste like ground pork- even sausage- in terms of all the body and aroma it gathered. The noodles were a jerusalem artichoke flour-enhanced semolina, which were OK, but next time I will roll out a custom pasta, probably heavy on some mushroom essence (powdered shiitake and/or duxelles of whatever's growing in the woods) to give added profundity to the umamitude. So go forth, and slobber; the easiest way to take your lasagna to another place is by using a passionately smoky broth.